The Walker

Rediscovering New York with David Hammons.

At a Starbucks in Cooper Square one recent evening, I waited in vain to meet David Hammons, the charismatic, elusive African-American artist whose much anticipated current solo show, at the Ace Gallery, is his first in New York in ten years. As the minutes went by and Hammons failed to appear (it turned out that he was waiting for me at another Starbucks, across the square), I weighed the odds that I was being treated to a custom-designed artwork. Hammons's strangely moving new installation, entitled “Concerto in Black and Blue,” consists entirely of pitch-dark rooms that visitors are invited to explore with tiny flashlights in the company of other visitors whose presence is registered only by whisperings, footsteps, and firefly points of blue light. What, I thought, could be a more apt complement to an exhibition of nothing than a non-rendezvous with the artist himself?

Hammons, who is fifty-nine years old, has long flouted an art world eager to make him a star. Museums and collectors prize such racially charged objects as stones crowned with hair, which the artist gathers from black barbershops, and drawings made by repeatedly bouncing a soiled basketball on ten-foot sheets of paper. He sells these works privately, often in Europe. His installations and performances tend to be ephemeral in the extreme. Perhaps his most famous work survives only in a droll photograph of the artist standing on a winter street in 1983, peddling snowballs. “I decided a long time ago that the less I do the more of an artist I am,” Hammons had said to me on the phone. “Most of the time, I hang out on the street. I walk.” He agreed to let me walk with him.

When I got tired of waiting for Hammons, I took the walk myself, through the East and West Villages. I looked at things in what I fancied was a Hammonsy way: with an eye for the odd human touch. Hammons is a connoisseur of the frowsy and the ad hoc. He once told an interviewer, “I really love to watch the way black people make things . . . just the way we use carpentry. Nothing fits, but everything works. . . . Everything is a thirty-second of an inch off.” For him, that spirit is both an aesthetic and an ethic. Back home, I got a perplexed call from the artist, who, after waiting for me, had set out on his own.

The following evening, Hammons and I met at the St. Mark's Bookshop, of which there is only one. A pleasantly gaunt, soft-spoken, watchful man, he wore a voluminous overcoat and a colorful knit cap. He shrugged off a crack I made about the proliferation of Starbucks. He reveres Starbucks, he let me know, for having made café culture universal and, not least, for providing toilets to walkers in the city. He takes walking seriously. In his company, I felt introduced to the East Village, which has been my neighborhood since 1973. Street people—or were they just people on the streets?—greeted him warmly, like constituents of a popular politician. He responded with courtly deference, giving them his full attention.

During our stroll, Hammons paused to behold casual marvels: a peculiar arrangement of potted plants braving the chill air outside a Japanese barbershop—”I always check out this place,” he said—or a swath of gleaming aluminum foil under an unused door of a restaurant, held down by bricks to block drafts. In Tompkins Square Park, we passed a woman walking a dog that wore a floppy plastic supermarket bag on an apparently injured leg. “Something like that is worth a whole night out,” Hammons said, gazing after the gimpy animal.

Hammons was born and grew up in Springfield, Illinois, the youngest of ten children of a single mother who worked menial jobs. “I still don't know how we got by,” he said. A poor student, he was shunted to vocational courses. He found drawing and other art activities so easy that he had disdain for them. In 1962, he moved to Los Angeles, where, after a halfhearted foray into commercial art, he attended the Chouinard Art Institute (later CalArts). He became excited by the antagonistic avant-gardism of L.A.-based international artists such as Bruce Nauman and Chris Burden. He joined a scene that was both laid-back and irascible. “If you showed more often than every three years, no one took you seriously,” he said. “Some people worked and worked and never showed at all. That's what I come from.” He is friends with many jazz musicians, whose scorn of commercial success he described with relish.

Hammons's brand of Dada isn't substantially original. Yves Klein exhibited a vacant gallery, entitled “The Void,” in 1958. Innumerable artists have exploited the poignance of shabby materials. Hammons freely admits to having been influenced by Arte Povera. (He told me that he was thrilled when that movement's master, Jannis Kounellis, agreed to a dual show with him in Rome in 1993.) But nothing in contemporary art matches his poetic compound of modesty, truculence, and wit. His radical independence stands out, to say the least, in today's scrabbling art world. It also distinguishes him from the itinerant artist-shamans who pop up regularly at international festivals. He regards that circuit as a trap. “The way I see it,” he said, “the Whitney Biennial and Documenta need me, but I don't need them.”

At one point during our meanderings, Hammons went into a bodega on First Avenue and bought a box of rice. A few minutes later, as we were passing a church, he said, “Watch this,” and tossed a few handfuls of grain on the steps. I said, “Who's getting married?” He said, “The wedding was earlier. We missed it.” At the time, I found the stunt hokey, but now I can't shake a vision of that forlorn bit of evidence of a wedding that never took place. Hammons married young, and he has two adult children. Divorced in the early seventies, he has never remarried. “As an artist, you have to keep reinventing yourself,” he said. “In a marriage, you have to be consistent. It's difficult.”

Hammons mentioned having once heard a tape of a rehearsal at which the late mystical jazzman Sun Ra instructed his musicians to play a standard—that is, an artifact of white culture—”incorrectly.” Ra explained, “They don't need you to play their music correctly. If you do, they have you.” Hammons commented, “That got to me. You know, you can play every note sharp or flat and still carry the tune.” For him, violating norms and expectations seems to be a craft that demands painstaking attention to detail.

I didn't ask him what it's like being black in a profession that remains overwhelmingly white. But he volunteered, “It's like being a white man in the jazz world, like Chet Baker or Gerry Mulligan. They had confidence. I feed off the confidence of jazz greats like them.” He disparaged the academic ironies of younger artists, including blacks, who pose as subversives. He said, “I'm the C.E.O. of the D.O.C.—the Duchamp Outpatient Clinic. We have a vaccine for that smartness virus that's been in the art world for the last fifty years.” The cure may be expressive activity that is streetwise, heartfelt, and utterly matter-of-fact.

We stopped for dinner at a Japanese restaurant on Avenue A. Under his overcoat, Hammons wore a lavender leather sports coat and an orange pullover shirt. He told me that he had recently done a work in the Japanese city of Yamaguchi: a huge boulder set in a miniature landscape on a flatbed truck, which travelled from neighborhood to neighborhood.

Hammons's experience in Japan helped inspire his latest installation, “Concerto in Black and Blue.” A visit to the Zen gardens in Kyoto made him realize, he said, that “there are so many kinds of nothingness.” Ace, an immense gallery on Hudson Street near the Holland Tunnel, is run by Doug Chrismas, a maverick dealer whose career has been almost as unpredictable as the artist's. “Doug was after me for six years to show with him,” Hammons said. “I had to wait until I analyzed the space. If you try to dominate it, it will make a fool of you every time.” He said that he dislikes the sterility of most New York galleries and museums, preferring European institutions, which are steeped in history. “The only place I really would like to show at in New York is the Metropolitan,” he said. “It's full of spirit.”

The nothingness of “Concerto” is beautifully measured, as if a mountain of darkness had been carved to fit snugly into the gallery's echoey rooms. As I wielded my dim cone of soft blue light, I felt curious about the identities of my invisible fellow-explorers but somehow forbidden to approach them. If the experience was profoundly disorienting, it was also endearingly funny in the frugality of its making—a tactic that is crucial for the artist. Hammons told me that he was aggrieved that many people had been stealing the flashlights, which, he said, cost just seventy cents apiece. He added that the installation, whose only materials are the flashlights, can be bought for a lofty price that varies according to how much space the buyer wants to darken. Our laughter, he didn't need to point out, is free. ♦

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